 Tony's Cinnamon Krunchers My original Hot Potato assignment was FrankenBerry®, and astonishingly, I could not locate it anywhere. I know I've had FrankenBerry®, before, but somehow it seems to have attained some sort of regional status. It's a good cereal, by the way. Failing to locate FrankenBerry® but not wanting to disappoint the Tossers (utter bastards though they are), I turned my search towards another weird offshoot of a core brand. As much as I believed there would be dozens of these, I could hardly find any, but the one I picked up seemed to satisfy the requirements. Before I go into that, I thought I should show how General Mills describes its line of Monster cereals: "Count Chocula is the chocolately cereal with spooky fun marshmallows. Introduced in 1971, Count Chocula is the only double chocolatey cereal – chocolate cereal pieces, and chocolate marshmallows. Boo, a blue ghost created in 1973, and Frank, a non-threatening Frankenstein, are the other friendly Monsters. The Monsters are spooky and friendly, not scary. Other Monsters cereals that are no longer available were Fruit Brute and Yummy Mummy."Notice how desperately the company tries to get across the point that these monsters are NOT scary or threatening. This leads me to believe that they must have gotten a lot of angry responses from parents whose children left the breakfast table in tears.
Tony's Cinnamon Krunchers is, plain and simple, a complete rip-off of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. The only difference is that the pieces are shaped differently. If you're going to copy a formula, though, you may as well base it on a good cereal, which is the case here. The Krunchers stay krunchy down to the last drop of milk, and they don't lose their cinnamon-sugar glaze at all. That is, until you have the cereal in your mouth, in which case that glaze covers your hard palate like smallpox blanket covers an Indian. What intrigues me most about this cereal is how it is a spin-off of Frosted Flakes in very much the same vein that "Chuck" was a spin-off of "Happy Days." Tony the Tiger is displayed prominently on the front, and even shouts his famous tagline of "They're Gr-r-reat!" I like the use of such "celebrity" endorsement of breakfast cereals. I would much prefer, however, for Tony's Cinnamon Krunchers to make no reference to Tony the Tiger at all, leaving one to wonder exactly who Tony might be. Or perhaps they could use Tony Danza, of the show "Tony" (a spin-off of both "Taxi" and "Who's the Boss?"). Except then we'd be back to square one with kids running screaming from the cereal bowl.
Review by Illusion Master |
